The dead included two pregnant women and two children. The DEA agents fired from helicopter gunships at a boat carrying the civilians, mistaking it for their intended target – a boat carrying drug traffickers.

Honduran news media and human rights organizations began publicizing the incident, of which the American people were not informed, and claimed the DEA agents themselves did the shooting. But after news broke out, U.S. authorities started claiming the American agents merely assisted Honduran forces, without doing any of the shooting themselves.

More than 600 U.S. troops are stationed in Honduras and the DEA has a Foreign-deployed Advisory Support Team based there. By the end of 2011, 42 Honduran law enforcement agents were working with the DEA, despite widespread human rights abuses and forced disappearances of political opponents and journalists.

“We have seen over the years that whenever the military interfaces with the populace, incidents of human rights abuses go way up,” said George Withers, a senior fellow at the Washington Office on Latin America. “We’re concerned that the U.S. is encouraging the use of the military for police work.”

In a written statement, the Committee of the Families of the Disappeared of Honduras (COFADEH), a human rights organization, said that “a foreign army [i.e., the U.S. army] protected under the new hegemonic concept of the ‘war on drugs,’ legalized with reforms to the 1953 Military Treaty, violates our territorial sovereignty and kills civilians as if it was in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya or Syria.”

COFADEH called Honduras “a failed state” and said “the so called Honduran authorities have the ethical and political duty to demand from the U.S. Department of State an explanation and a public apology, and to punish those responsible.”

293069 Responseshttp%3A%2F%2Fnews.antiwar.com%2F2012%2F05%2F16%2Fus-dea-agents-kill-up-to-six-civilians-in-honduras%2FUS+DEA+Agents+Kill+Up+to+Six+Civilians+in+Honduras2012-05-17+01%3A36%3A37John+Glaserhttp%3A%2F%2Fnews.antiwar.com%2F%3Fp%3D29306 to “US DEA Agents Kill Up to Six Civilians in Honduras”

"COFADEH called Honduras “a failed state” and said “the so called Honduran authorities have the ethical and political duty to demand from the U.S. Department of State an explanation and a public apology, and to punish those responsible."

Failed only as an independant nation. Of course it's not independant, it's a de facto colony or puppet state of Washington's global empire. So yea, failure as a state but rousing success as a puppet state.

There is only one solution and that is for the Hondurans to get help from Morales and Chavez and continue to have close ties with Iran, Cuba and Russia lest our government think it can start deploying American military in Honduras too.

Now that they're not trying to stop communism in Latin America, and almost right on schedule, the US had its hands full of drug interdiction (Iran Contra and the crack epidemic comes to mind, as the Soviet Union was imploding). Just over the border in Mexico, war rages for control of the lucrative trafficking trade. I wonder when all those bases in Honduras were built. If we ever have to leave the Middle East, we'll be all set to find other causes, like Don Quixote with a bionic body, storming through Latin America. The expansion of that cause will make up for the contraction of the other, if it ever happens.